3D Scraps #03

So 2008 was the year that I started my 3D animation course at the SAE Institute in East Perth, and as a way to prepare myself for the experience I decided to have a real go at creating a 3D character (or atleast a character bust in this case). This was one of those real great learning experiences which not only fueled my motivation and passion for computer graphics but also really (fine) tuned my skills at the time.

I had always wanted to develop lifelike characters and achieving photo-realism [be it computer graphics or drawing/painting] is always something that facinates me. I'm a huge fan of the work of 3D artist Francisco Cortina, ever since Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and the Animatrix: Final Flight of the Osiris and also 3D Artist Olivier Ponsonnet who is just amazing. Their work was the inspiration and motivation behind me really having a go and aiming for something I've never achieved before with 3D.

I remember getting to this stage of the modelling process and giggling like a little school girl. I was really excited with how the face was turning out, it was better than any previous face I had modelled and was eager to see just how well it would turn out on completion.

I was really psyched at this stage. I had decided that I'd just model to the chest region so I could focus all my effort and attention on the face.

A view of the character's topology.

Here, I was focusing on nailing the look of the eyes and brows. The skin shader was looking very worse for wear at this stage though.

A shot of the profile with skin texture and an updated skin shader.

A front view of the bust with textures. At this stage I believe I was still playing around with lighting and getting a more believable skin look with the shader (using Sub-surface scattering).

After some messing around (mostly with the hair dynamics in 3ds Max), I ended up with this final image. Honestly I quickly started disliking this image, since the pose was basically static, emotionless and the hair turned out terrible, not to mention it all just felt flat and boring.

Now, about mid-way through the year, during my animation studies, I had learnt a lot of really cool things that I could do in Maya (the 3D software that we were learning on), and so I decided to re-visit this character I had done at the beginning of the year. After spending some time transfering everything relevent from 3ds Max over to Maya, I began to make enhancements.

One of the new test renders of the character with a revised skin shader and lighting setup.

I created a rig for the character so that I could pose it, which also gave me the opportunity to animate it if I wanted. This was the same excitment I had before when I initially started modelling her at the beginning!

Another test render, this time with a bit of a pose.

After some further work (hair, designer specs and a baseball cap), this was a portrait I made using the character. I felt a lot more satisfied with the way this one turned out, it had more life to it.

And because I could, I decided to have a bit of a play with her and animate her saying a few things that I could use later for my show reel. And with the help of the wonderful Natalie Van Sistine [who gave the puppet it's voice], she came truely alive!

In all, this was a really interesting journey of learning new things and applying all that stuff to be able to create something [in my opinion] quite cool!